Datafication Markers: Curation and User Network Effects on Mobilization and Polarization During Elections (original) (raw)
Related papers
Boon or Bane for Political Engagement: A Large-Scale Study of Normalization of Facebook
Does Facebook help or hurt political engagement? Some scholars argue (e.g., Resnick, 1997, 1998) that social media has taken over old media (e.g., newspaper, television) as a leading communication channel, but communication practices of human beings remain unchanged on the web. Resnick suggests the internet neither empowers citizens nor revitalizes democracy, because online communications occur within preexisting economic, legal, and social frameworks. To test this theory called normalization of the cyberspace, this study examines engagement on two verified Facebook pages run by the campaigns of two main candidates of the 2016 U.S. presidential election—Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. The study combines two computational methods—sentiment analysis and automated topic classification—and a quantitative content analysis method to analyze 6,122 status messages, 2.8 million user comments, and 0.6 million replies. Results largely support the claims of the theory that traditional communication practices of election campaigns are transferred to the internet.
Media and Communication
Contemporary democracies are increasingly shaped by a surge of populism, posing serious threats to the idea of liberal democracy. Particularly in the run-up to elections, knowledge of such threats is essential for citizens to cast an informed vote. Against this background, the present study examined the likelihood of media users to engage with political news providing critical perspectives on populist movements in a 24-hour social media field experiment during the 2017 federal election campaign in Germany (N = 210). Based on two selective exposure measures, findings suggest that exposure to critical news is contingent upon the conceptualization of populist partisanship as a political orientation of either high commitment (i.e., voting intention) or high affinity (i.e., sympathy for a party). While high commitment triggered a rather classic confirmation bias, especially regarding click decisions, high affinity caused selection patterns to be more strongly guided by informational util...
Reaching the bubble may not be enough: news media role in online political polarization
EPJ Data Science
Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization would be by distributing cross-partisan news among individuals with distinct political orientations, i.e., “reaching the bubbles”. This study investigates whether this holds in the context of nationwide elections in Brazil and Canada. We collected politics-related tweets shared during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election and the 2019 Canadian federal election. Next, we proposed an updated centrality metric that enables identifying highly central bubble reachers, nodes that can distribute content among users with diverging political opinions—a fundamental metric for the proposed study. After that, we analyzed how users engage with news content shared by bubble reachers, its source, and its topics, considering its political orientation. Among other res...
News use via social media has been linked to pro-democratic political behaviors. However, most people use social media for non-political purposes, like connecting with friends and browsing news feeds. Recent research indicates these behaviors may also have democratic benefits, by means of political expression in social media. Drawing on panel data from a nationally representative sample, this study extends this line of research by exploring how social interaction and news-seeking behaviors on social media lead to diverse networks, exposure to dissenting political opinion, and ultimately reconsidering and changing one’s political views. Social media are a unique communication platform, and their attributes might influence exposure to political information. The tendency for users to build and maintain friend networks creates a potential deliberative space for political persuasion to take place. Consistent with prior literature, news use leads to political persuasion. More interestingly, apolitical, but social interactive uses of social media also lead to political persuasion. These relationships are partially mediated through network and discussion attributes.
Popping the bubble may not be enough: news media role in online political polarization
2021
Correspondence: jordan@alunos.utfpr.edu.br Informatics, Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná, Curitiba, Brazil Full list of author information is available at the end of the article Abstract Politics in different countries show diverse degrees of polarization, which tends to be stronger on social media, given how easy it became to connect and engage with like-minded individuals on the web. A way of reducing polarization would be by distributing cross-partisan news among individuals with distinct political orientations, i.e., “popping the bubbles”. This study investigates whether this holds in the context of nationwide elections in Brazil and Canada. We collected politics-related tweets shared during the 2018 Brazilian presidential election and the 2019 Canadian federal election. Next, we proposed a new centrality metric that enables identifying highly central bubble poppers, nodes that can distribute content among users with diverging political opinions a fundamental metric fo...
First Monday, 2019
Since 2016, online social networks (OSNs), especially their "big data" algorithms, have been intensively blamed in popular news discourse for acting as echo chambers. These chambers entrap like-minded voters in closed ideological circles that cause serious damage to democratic processes. This study examines this "echo chamber" argument through the rather divisive case of EU politics among EU citizens. Based on an exploratory secondary analysis of the Eurobarometer 86.2 survey dataset, we investigate whether the reliance on OSNs as a primary EU political news source can lead people to more polarisation in EU-related political beliefs and attitudes than a reliance on traditional media. We found little evidence for this polarisation, lending credence to a rejection of social media's "echo chamber" effect.
Network polarization in online politics participatory media
Political polarization is traditionally analyzed through the ideological stances of groups and parties, but it also has a behavioral component that manifests in the interactions between individuals. We present an empirical analysis of the digital traces of politicians in politnetz.ch, a Swiss online platform focused on political activity, in which politicians interact by creating support links, comments, and likes. We analyze network polarization as the level of intraparty cohesion with respect to inter-party connectivity, finding that supports show a very strongly polarized structure with respect to party alignment. The analysis of this multiplex network shows that each layer of interaction contains relevant information, where comment groups follow topics related to Swiss politics. Our analysis reveals that polarization in the layer of likes evolves in time, increasing close to the federal elections of 2011. Furthermore, we analyze the internal social network of each party through metrics related to hierarchical structures, information efficiency, and social resilience. Our results suggest that the online social structure of a party is related to its ideology, and reveal that the degree of connectivity across two parties increases when they are close in the ideological space of a multi-party system.
Algorithmic Curation and Users’ Civic Attitudes: A Study on Facebook News Feed Results
Information, 2021
Facebook users are exposed to diverse news and political content; this means that Facebook is a significant tool for the enhancement of civic participation and engagement in politics. However, it has been argued that Facebook, through its algorithmic curation reinforces the pre-existing attitudes of individuals, rather than challenging or potentially altering them. The objective of this study is to elucidate the emotional and behavioural impact of the personalization of Facebook users’ News Feeds results, and thereby to uncover a possible link between their online and offline civic attitudes. Firstly, we investigate the extent to which users’ Facebook News Feeds results are personalized and customized to fit users’ pre-existing civic attitudes and political interests. Secondly, we explore whether users embody new roles as a result of their emotional and behavioural interaction with political content on Facebook. Our methodology is based on a quantitative survey involving 108 participants. Our findings indicate that, while Facebook can potentially expose users to varying political views and beliefs, it tends to reinforce existing civic attitudes and validate what users already hold to be true. Furthermore, we find that users themselves often assume a proactive stance towards Facebook News Feed results, acquiring roles in which they filter and even censor the content to which they are exposed and thus trying to obfuscate algorithmic curation.
Social Network Analysis and Mining
Political campaign activities are increasingly digital. A crucial part of digital campaigning is communication efforts on social media platforms. As a forum for political discourse and political communication, parties and candidates on Twitter share public messages and aim to attract media attention and persuade voters. Party or prominent candidate hashtags are a central element of the campaign communication strategy since journalists and citizens search for these hashtags to follow the current debate concerning the hashed party or political candidate. Political elites and partisans use social media strategically, e.g., to link their messages to a broader debate, increase the visibility of messages, criticize other parties, or take over their hashtags (hashjacking). This study investigates the cases of the most recent 2017 and 2021 German federal elections called 'Bundestagswahlen'. The investigation (1) identifies communities of partisans in retweet networks in order to ana...